During Digital Meet, an Italian event for digital evangelization, I met David Orban, the president of Singularity University Italy.
SingularityU is an institute born in the Silicon Valley (USA) thanks to the funds of Google and NASA. Its mission is to educate, inspire and empower leaders to apply exponential technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges. In other words, it is like the last starship of Interstellar which travels through a wormhole in space in an attempt to ensure humanity's survival!
I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to interview a VIP like him, above all, for the sake of my community of explorers. What secret of the universe did he unveil?
Keep reading below to find out!
THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN THOUGHT:
FROM SLAVERY TO ROBOTS
Investor, entrepreneur, speaker, author and thought leader in global tech panorama, David Orban is the expert.
Humanity’s roots of violence: choice or need?
I consider it very interesting the point of view that everything, including our morals, depends on the grade of our technology.
For example, slavery existed to make up for a specific need: having low cost labor. At that time, slavery was accepted, because there wasn’t any other solution. If a slave died, he was immediately replaced with another like we do nowadays with machines.
But let’s deepen this vision a bit more.
From child labor to machines
1800s England was in the middle of the Industrial Revolution and, in 1750, it registered an increase of the birth rate. This factor was critical for urban and industrial growth, because it gave a wide supply of cheap labor.
And here comes the interesting part.
Although the British parliament issued many Factory Acts over time which limited the use of child labor, its actual decrease was possible thanks to other two fundamental elements: technological transformations and the increase of the average income.
It is usually thought that technological innovations involved an increase in the employment of children, inasmuch all the work was mechanized and there were no need of strength or skills. This interpretation assumes that children, under 14 years, would have been hired and taken over adults. But it is not true.
In fact, children were used to do only secondary tasks, as helpers of adult workers. The better a factory's organization, which only became possible by technological transformations, the less secondary workers were required and child labor demand decreased.
In addition, the overall increase of general household wealth decreased the need to send children to work.
Our ethics evolves with technology
Recapping the point of this historical digression, technology also changes the way people think and perceive facts. Child labor was legal and commonly accepted, but when mechanical energy was introduced, people’s needs changed and also common sense evolved over time.
We usually consider our values and ethics superior than our predecessors’, but if we analyze history we understand that they develop together with technology.
Technology changes the way things are done, our lifestyle, and the way we feel and experience things.
According to this point of view, many other related scenarios can be opened. For example, besides our forerunners, we usually judge underdeveloped countries’ customs and traditions, because of the existence of child labor, death penalty, stoning or different rights for women.
If we look back at present day in the next 10 or 20 years, would we consider ourselves immoral cave men?
THE ACCELERATION CURVE OF TECHNOLOGY
David Orban enlightened us with another amazing concept: the exponential growth of technology. To understand it, I try to use the same example he used, which is the $3B challenge set by the US government to discover the complete sequence of the human genome.
Human Genome: a case study
Everybody knows what the human genome is, right? Well, just to dust off our high-school science studies, the human genome is the Homo sapiens’s complete set of nucleotide sequences (which comprehends the nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA).
In 1990, the US government started the ambitious HGP, Human Genome Project, an international scientific research project to determine the sequence of nucleotide base pairs which make up human DNA and, identify and map all of the human genome’s genes from both a physical and a functional standpoint.
This project was funded for $3B and planned to last 15 years.
After about 5 years, scientists were able to discover only 1% of the human genome and a large portion of the budget was burnt. They were on the verge of bankruptcy. It seemed to be impossible to be able to reach their goal within the time and budget scheduled.
But we know this is a story with a happily ever after, don’t we?
Analyzing the work progress, they were able to notice something peculiar: the growth wasn’t linear, but exponential.
…, 0.0625, 0.1250, 0.5000, 1, ...
In 2003, 2 years before the official deadline, researchers delivered their final outcome.
This case study represents perfectly the trend of technology growth and while in 2003 the genome sequencing and analysis costed $2,7B, in 2017, it dropped to $1000. So, would we expect to pay $0.02 in 2020?
OLAY: the theoretical model for IT growth
If we look back at the history of humanity, every era was characterized by a raise of a certain technology, a crisis and another raise due to a change of technology.
In 1970s, Richard L. Nolan (an American business theorist) described in the Harvard Business Review his six-stage growth model by which information technology is leveraged by organizations.
The rate at which technology was deployed could be depicted by a series of s-curves. The time periods between the s-curves were periods of discontinuity: first, technological discontinuity and then, organizational discontinuity.
So, the timeline can be formed by many s-curves which follow each other and every curve is divided in 6 stages:
Initiation: the new technology is adopted by organizations;
Contagion: a part of the population alienate themselves from the new technology. So, adoption of the new technology is different among areas and it raises a need of evangelization to explain to people the potential advantages of its adoption;
Control: it raises the need of controlling and managing the time and operating costs of the new technology. Project management and report systems are organized;
Integration: the new technology is integrated with systems that were previously separate entities;
Data administration: the new technology pushes laws and regulations to evolve and expects that the new data gathered are “administrated” and managed properly;
Maturity: Everything is set up and works smoothly.
When a new technology comes, the market and society are destabilized again and the process repeats in a loop.
Where are we and how can SMEs face our new technology revolution?
Nowadays, we are in between two s-curves and companies who can really apply all of the new technologies brought up by the 4.0 revolution are few. So, how can SMEs (above all for a territory like Italy, where there are many small businesses or clusters) face these new challenges?
I interviewed Roberto Santolamazza, the managing director at t2i, who explained his vision on the topic.
While tools based on new technologies are continuously becoming cheaper, skilled people, who are able to make a positive impact in organizations, run low. In fact, standing on Nolan’s theory, we are (or at least Italy, the context where this summit took place) in the Contagion stage: a huge part of the population is not prepared and many people alienate themselves from new technologies. So, how can companies make hiring professionals affordable?
One among the possible solutions is the fractional management (also called: temporary or virtual management). Companies share skilled professionals and, in this way, can have the benefit of high professional competencies and lower costs.
I am a virtual manager, would you like to schedule a free digital marketing assessment?
A temporary manager works for a company two or three days per week, managing the high level strategy, while operational tasks are left to employees. He can deal with many companies at a time, so he is actually shared among different businesses. The main advantage is the overall lower cost and the final, highly positive outcome.
Another key point, useful for SME entrepreneurs, is testing. David Orban agrees with Roberto saying that no one knows a strategy’s or new tool’s outcome when the context is itself unknown. This new era has just begun, so the only way to grow is testing. Testing comes together with failing, but failing shouldn’t be lived as a defeat, but as an experimentation.
Only companies which embrace the way of experimenting will be able to be successful faster and consolidate their presence in the market.
LOOK, IMAGINE, BUILD AND BECOME THE FUTURE
Digital Meet: meeting technology
Discover, use, make, dream. These are the keywords of Digital Meet, the greatest Italian festival about digital, ICT and internet world. So, it’s not just a “meeting”, but a series of events which claims all cities across Italy to organize events to evangelize people on cutting edge technology topics.
It was already the end of the festival when David Orban came to talk. An explosive ending!
“Look, imagine, build and become the future” was the title chosen for David’s lectio magistralis, an hour speech deep into his educational background, about his vision on the relationship between man and machine.
It followed a round table with 5 of the most important entrepreneurs in Veneto (a northern Italian region).
A digital meeting in the oldest botanical garden of the world
Unique talk, sweet location. Back again at the Botanical Garden of Padua, the oldest existing botanical garden in the world that I explored last year and interviewed its keeper, the professor Barbara Baldan of the University of Padua.
It was amazing getting back to this place, not as an explorer, but as a marketer.
Created in 1545 and aimed at teaching students the properties of medicinal plants, it’s now a must stop if you visit Padua.
t2i: technological transfers and innovation
Roberto Santolamazza leads t2i, an institutional Venetian hub which supports start-ups and new business ideas through public funds and incubators’ networks. t2i aims at increasing the appeal of European tenders to Italian companies and helping them develop projects able to win these tenders.
Other activities of this company are focused on supporting innovation: new skills teaching, product certifications, intellectual property safeguards and high tech product development.
Comments